Problems related to misidentification and resulting erroneous delivery of drugs are well known in the medical care art. Other problems related to drug control, maintaining adequate drug records, contamination of drugs prepared on patient floors are also well known in the pharmaceutical art. This invention provides solutions to the above disclosed problems and many others as will become evident hereafter.
Manual dispensing of drugs from pharmacy to anesthesia is a common practice in hospitals and other surgery facilities today. Anesthesia providing departments generally fill syringes with drugs, administer the drugs directly to patients and document the drug handling process in a retrospective manner using handwritten entries. The likelihood of human imperfections makes drug diversion, medication errors, errors of omission, medication contamination and inadvertent needle sticks a constant companion to drug administration. Additionally, the process is exacerbated by emergency situations which demand hurried set up and administration of drugs, with concurrently less time to pay attention to timely and accurate record keeping.
Contemporarily, the problems related above are being addressed by approaches meant to improve drug delivery and control. These approaches comprise production and use of pre-packaged drug menus which involve return to the pharmacy of each unused package to simplify and assure better control in drug accounting; making drug dispensing machines which automatically dispense drugs and provide a record certain as drugs are removed therefrom; delivering drug "lock boxes" to a requesting physician, thereby putting direct responsibility for drug accounting upon the physician of record; and utilizing electronic recording devices whereby documentation of drug delivery data is captured via electronic data acquisition devices, such as bar code readers or keyboards. All of these approaches, used alone or in combination, exhibit deficiencies which are well known in the drug dispensing and monitoring art.